Television program distribution systems are available that provide different advertisements or commercial messages to different demographically targeted television audiences, e.g., cable or satellite television audiences. In such systems audience specific commercials or advertisements are spliced into a television feed. Thus, although the program content is distributed over a wide geographical area, different commercials or advertising are broadcast to different geographical areas providing targeted advertising.
Prior art systems require transmission of a common television message and a plurality of different multi-channel television messages over a plurality of contemporaneous channels. Predefined viewer characteristics, such as demographic characteristics, are used as the basis for selecting one of the commercial message sub-channels each time a commercial break occurs in the main television program carried on the particular television channel. In these prior art systems targeted commercials or advertisements are provided as discrete video streams in different channels or sub-channels and additional bandwidth is required for additional advertisements.